Handwritten Faulkner Manuscript Found

BOOKS

October 18, 1987|By EDWIN MCDOWELL, New York Times News Service

The University of Virginia`s Alderman Library has bought 45 handwritten pages of William Faulkner`s Mosquitoes, the author`s second novel, which was previously thought to have been composed on a typewriter.

Eight of the manuscript pages, ruminations on art and creativity, do not appear in the book, at least not in the same sequence. And the order of other manuscript pages varies from the typescript and from the edition printed by Boni & Liveright in 1927.

``As far as we know, it is the last major literary manuscript of William Faulkner`s that is not accounted for,`` said Joan Crane, curator of American literature collections at the library.

Carvel Collins, a Faulkner scholar, said he was surprised to learn that so much of Mosquitoes was handwritten. ``The only fragments I know of were typed,`` said Collins, who is writing Faulkner`s Early Publications for Random House. ``No handwritten manuscript was ever found for Soldier`s Pay, Faulkner`s first novel, which he wrote in New Orleans early in 1925, and it was assumed that he also wrote Mosquitoes on the typewriter.``

Faulkner wrote his subsequent manuscripts in longhand, Collins added, before ``doing a two-finger typescript, revising as he went along.``

Mosquitoes, a satirical novel about New Orleans bohemianism, is thought to have been written in Paris, where the author lived for a time beginning in the summer of 1925. According to Crane, the paper on which the handwritten manuscript was written is similar to that on which Faulker typed Elmer, a story he wrote in France. The Elmer manuscript is now at the Alderman Library, which owns many other manuscripts and typescripts of Faulkner, who in 1957 became the university`s first writer in residence.

Scholars will study the handwritten Mosquitoes manuscript, with its revisions, to chart Faulkner`s development as an author, Collins said. It was during this period that the Mississippian, who in 1949 became the fourth American to win the Nobel Prize in literature, decided to become a novelist rather than a poet. Altogether, he wrote 19 novels.

Michael Plunkett, associate curator of manuscripts at the library, said the manuscript had been in the possession of a collector since at least 1961. Last August, a Philadelphia dealer in manuscripts asked the University of Virginia if it wanted to buy it.

While not disclosing the purchase price, Plunkett said the money to buy the manuscript came entirely from private funds raised from friends of the library for that purpose.